Category archive: Short Stories

A funny thing happened to my royalties from Amazon after I put a few of my short stories on KDP Select. They went up. I didn’t pay much attention at first, but I always seemed to be making more than I expected each month. I knew people were borrowing my short stories through Kindle Unlimited, but it wasn’t until I scrutinized the royalty statements that I understood what was going on.

I’ve watched with fascination over the last four years as self-publishing changes. In the early days (2010), when many authors still feared self-publishing, selling novels on Amazon was much easier. My short stories used to go at the rate of one or two a day. Now, even getting people to download your free novel by the thousands (which also used to be easy) is a challenge because the market is so crowded.

Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free? This rather antique view was held by my grandparents’ generation, which apparently equated milk with sex and women with cows. You can see what I mean by antique. This warning for young women implied that all men wanted from marriage was sex, and this was a commodity that must be withheld until he was trapped with a marriage certificate. But people have been more free with love since the sixties, and they still get married and have children. Apparently there are more reasons to get married than just sex. Dare I say love?

My short story, White Metal, took the cover of the Storyteller Magazine’s fall 2006 edition, but this is not that cover. Because I can’t get the rights to the cover from Storyteller, even though it’s gone out of business, I had to do up my own cover. It’s actually better.

I now have all six of the Sioux Rock Falls stories up on Amazon. I’m working on two more shorts and I’ll launch the whole series as anthology in a couple of weeks. What do you think of the title: Reckless in Sioux Rock?

The Stop Watch Gang is a writers group that has already generated a lot of great published short stories. I had a few beers with them last night at the Ad Astra SF convention and went to their reading , and I gotta say there’s a lot of talent in that group.

I’m betting there will be published novels from these writers in the near future.

But speaking of published: the second story I ever had published, Beer Truck, is now available for Kindle. Take it for a spin, but keep in mind that the story is about people doing very dumb things, taking chances so huge that a Darwin Award is but one slippery grip away. Don’t try this at home.

Railroaded tied for second in the 2005 Great Canadian story contest. How three judges tied for their second place vote I’m not really sure, but hey, I’ll take it.

Why yellow for the titles? Well red doesn’t reduce well to an Amazon thumbnail, so reading even the big title was a challenge.

I’m going out on a limb here, but I bet you’ll find that titles and author names in future books are going to get bigger and fatter as designers are ordered to create titles that look good both as full size and as thumbnails.

The title in red will be available for the Sony soon as e-pub, thanks to the open source software called Calibre. On my Sony the red looks just fine, but hey, it’s being displayed full screen and gray scale. I wonder what it looks like on a color Nook?

I promise to get that how-to menu item up there next week. But for now: enjoy Railroaded.

I’ve gone nuclear on my Microsoft Word document; I’ve loaded Mobipocket creator to the PC side of my MAC, since Mobi doesn’t make a MAC version. Finally, I photoshopped the spiffy new cover you see on the left.